We here at the Goldblog glass-enclosed nerve center are getting a lot of heat from our right about our assertion that not much has changed on the Israeli political landscape, especially in relation to issues concerning the Palestinians.

A number of our interlocutors have gone so far as to suggest that Goldblog hates Jews, or hates himself, or hates that aspect of himself that is Jewish, for asserting that, while the Palestinians have an enormous role to play in bringing about compromise, it is actually Israel that occupies, and colonizes, the territory needed to make real that compromise. Well, to this, I say, as I've said before, that it is pro-Israel to be in favor of a settlement freeze, and in favor of jump-started negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. There is no other way out of the trap in which Israel finds itself. Most Israelis, according to the polls, believe in preserving both their country's Jewish character, and its democracy. This is not possible to achieve so long as millions of Palestinians are ruled, against their will, by Israel.

I am a chronic optimist (which, in the Middle East context, means that I don't believe the world will end tomorrow) but the recent Israeli election results did not fill me with the belief that renewed, meaningful negotiations are around the corner. In my Bloomberg View column, I outline some reasons for pessimism (as well as some reasons for optimism).

Here are a few reasons to be optimistic:

1. The inclusion of Lapid in Netanyahu's next coalition government -- which seems like a certainty -- means the prime minister will have to accede to Lapid's demand that he jump- start negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas.

2. U.S. allies in the Middle East and Europe -- particularly Jordan's King Abdullah II and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron -- are desperate to see President Barack Obama retake the initiative and pressure Netanyahu and Abbas to begin talks in earnest, and they're beginning to lobby Obama intensively.

3. Senator John Kerry, Obama's nominee to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, is deeply invested in finding a way to restart negotiations. His power is not negligible, and perhaps he has fresher ideas than the previous generation of Middle East peace negotiators, typified by the longtime diplomat Dennis Ross.

4. The Palestinian Authority still exists. This is something of a miracle. It hasn't yet been replaced by Hamas, or by chaos.

There are a few more in the column. Here are a few reasons to feel pessimistic:

1. Netanyahu is still Netanyahu. Under great pressure from the U.S., Netanyahu did endorse, in principle, the idea of two states for two peoples in 2009. But he has done nothing since to advance that goal. He has frozen settlement growth temporarily - - again under intense U.S. pressure -- but he invariably unfreezes the settlements, and his government seems to be devising new ways to prevent the birth of a Palestinian state each day.

2. Abbas is still Abbas. Netanyahu isn't exactly rejecting the extended hand of a flawless peace partner. Abbas is weak and vacillating, and has proved himself adept at rejecting reasonable offers from Israeli interlocutors.

3. The Palestinians are still engaged in a civil war. Lest we forget, Hamas, a group that seeks Israel's destruction, is still in control of half of the would-be state of Palestine, and it hasn't made up with the Palestinian Authority, which controls some of the West Bank. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Israel would make concessions to a Palestinian Authority that isn't in a position to rule Palestine.

At this point, I actually do feel pretty comprehensively pessimistic, for many reasons, but in large part because I don't think Netanyahu is prepared to take even the most moderate sort of confidence-building steps -- such as stopping the rapid expansion of settlements on territory that would have to be part of an independent Palestinian state -- needed to set the stage for negotiations. A few years from now, when the two-state idea is dead and buried, I'm afraid we will look back on Netanyahu and curse him for his blindness. Right now, he has time to design an orderly transition out of the West Bank, but he's doing everything in his power to keep the Palestinian state from being born.

UPDATE: Yair Rosenberg sent this along -- Yossi Beilin, the former peace negotiator, arguing that Netanyahu might be willing to go for provisional borders:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to agree to the creation of a Palestinian state in provisional borders, even before his conditions for a final-status agreement are met, former minister and veteran peace activist Yossi Beilin said.

"I don't think that Netanyahu, who is far from being a warmonger -- he's a very cautious person -- [is ready to commit to] a permanent solution. Not because he doesn't want it -- all of us want it -- but because he's not ready to pay the price," Beilin said Monday night. "But to speak about a provisional border with the Palestinians, this is something that I heard from him that we would be ready to do it."

Speaking in English at a debate in front of Jewish-American leaders visiting Jerusalem, Beilin said that both Israeli and Palestinian leaders are presently not ready to agree to terms for a permanent settlement. Yet both Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would be willing to go ahead with an interim agreement, which would include a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines with land swaps, so that major settlement blocs would remain in Israel, Beilin said. The delicate questions of Jerusalem and refugees would not be addressed immediately but held for final-status talks down the line, according to Beilin.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.